i'm in the unpopular crowd who don't ultimately enjoy Raging Bull (although it is amazing visually and Cathy Moriarty is excellent), because it's truly a movie more about Scorsese and De Niro's hangups and pretensions than it is about LaMotta. Scorsese projecting his catholicism onto Jake (a man who had no interest in God) was repellent, for example. De Niro did a fair job on catching some outward essence of Jake (for which he was praised by the man himself), but he did a poor job on catching the soul, even in the movie's most ostensibly excoriating scenes.

Ali is a movie i didn't need to see. the wealth of Ali documentary material available always rendered it redundant, for me. the real thing will always be more remarkable. i just could never get up for watching it.